


From Ruin

by undersaffiresky



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alpha Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-12
Updated: 2014-01-12
Packaged: 2018-01-08 13:09:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1133032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/undersaffiresky/pseuds/undersaffiresky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The two of them have been dying for a very long time. </p><p>They’ve watched it happen in their dreams. They’ve read it in the hard lines of their palms. They’ve caught it lurking all too often in the shadows of each other’s eyes where every unsaid truth is hidden. They are both subconsciously aware of how death has claimed them for its own, how it has buried itself into the very souls of their every incarnation. </p><p>But their existence was never about living, really. That was never the point. Surviving was never their <i>raison d’etre.</i> They’ve known that for a long time, too.</p><p>Their fortune has always been that of the Hanged Man, willing to die a thousand sacrificial deaths to see the Fool’s path set straight.</p><p>But their true purpose, in the end, was simply to be remembered, to do their part in helping pave the way for the hero-gods who would arrive long after they had fallen and begin to rebuild their broken universe from ruin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From Ruin

**Author's Note:**

> Been trying to get back into writing Homestuck again. This is an Alpha Dave + Alpha Rose 'fic I started awhile back, focused on exploring their sibling-esque relationship and what went on during the time they were alive (and what _could_ have happened but didn't) and so on. Meant to be a one shot. Will probably go up in parts to fit with my idea of pacing this. This is the sort of stuff I'd never be able to do in _LEDE_ , since canon alone has pretty much murdered that possibility. So this is sort of an outlet.
> 
> Written as a fill for [this](http://homesmut.livejournal.com/17313.html?thread=35333025) prompt. Not smut in the least, however.

The two of them have been dying for a very long time. 

They’ve watched it happen in their dreams. They’ve read it in the hard lines of their palms. They’ve caught it lurking all too often in the shadows of each other’s eyes where every unsaid truth is hidden. They are both subconsciously aware of how death has claimed them for its own, how it has buried itself into the very souls of their every incarnation. 

But their existence was never about living, really. That was never the point. Surviving was never their _raison d’etre._ They’ve known that for a long time, too.

Their fortune has always been that of the Hanged Man, willing to die a thousand sacrificial deaths to see the Fool’s path set straight.

But their true purpose, in the end, was simply to be remembered, to do their part in helping pave the way for the hero-gods who would arrive long after they had fallen and begin to rebuild their broken universe from ruin.

** 0 - The Fool **

This is an entirely different type of darkness from the kinds Rose is used to. This isn’t the midnight shade common to the night hours of the temporal world, nor is it the inky blackness that verges on purple that she can sometimes envision when she closes her eyes and is neither asleep nor awake. This is certainly not the dark she finds when she strains her ears and tries to catch the singing whispers of guttural voices that she can sometimes understand. The darkness here is not so much black as it is a hazy gray gradient that bleeds into almost darker but not-quite-black gloom around oddly circular edges. The greys in the middle are fluid and remind her of shadows, but are fuzzy and less defined.

She tries to categorize the shadow-shapes into something recognizable, but her mind feels fragmented and scattered and she thinks she tastes copper around her mouth and on her tongue. There’s a heavy, sharp weight pressing hard against her chest but she can’t identify its source, nor can she pinpoint the origin of the noise that’s growing louder as the static ringing filling her ears recedes into something less muffled but still not quite right. Even so, a harsh note seems to be commanding her to breathe.

Interesting.

She does, and the air sears through her like thousands of paper knives.

She can sense something else in the atmosphere now, something enveloping and static and burnt like ozone. The air is now hot and fleeting and stubborn, not entirely willing to be forced inside her throat and eaten by her lungs. She finds it frustrating that she cannot place any of it to something concrete. Something that would make sense and paint her a picture.

She wonders, then, like she would any idle curiosity, how many breaths she has left before the air decays from whatever energy besides her that is consuming it.

The answer that comes to her, the one that snaps across her synapses with almost supernatural vigor, is many and yet none at all.

**-(ø)-**

Rose first meets Dave by coincidence. Well, not entirely by coincidence. Rose has come to terms with the fact that very few things that happen in the world are completely coincidental.

She has seen Dave before, in the imprints of colored light that often blaze behind her eyes, in the flickering embers of insight that come to her when she searches for the right path, weighing her options like they were piles of coins on opposite ends of a balancing scale. 

It’s an ability that took her years to make sense of and control with some degree of mastery, because in this universe she has no mentor to manipulate and guide her. All she has is herself and her intuition coupled with a penchant for experimenting with the dubious and the occult—interests that are best kept confined to books and out reality’s reach, not so much because believing in such things would make her crazy, or because such flights of indulgent fantasy aren’t real, but because they are dangerous.

(But that has never once stopped Rose Lalonde from pursuing anything.) 

And so Rose has learned to embrace what has always been hers, and trust in what the lights and the voices and the careful nudges of preternatural intuition tell her.

And it has guided her (and only because she allowed it) to this young man in front of her. She knows him, in her own way. She knows his name because he told her—or will tell her in a matter what can only be moments in the hourglass. She knows much more about him because she has done her research. She knows that he grew up like her, without a family, through reasons that were no fault of his own. It was never because he was ever unwanted or unneeded by anyone in life, just like how it was never about her never being good enough for a family: it’s just how the cards of an apathetic universe fell. In that, they are the same.

She’s also well aware that his eyes are red and that he always wears sunglasses. She’s read his comics, five volumes of which have all ready been published with the rumor of a film in the making, and they are ever growing in both popularity and notoriety. This is mostly because the people of the world do not yet know what to make of Dave Strider. She doesn’t blame them. She was curious once, too. 

Perhaps with enough effort she could figure out why he is here now in New York, but she doesn’t depend on her sixth sense for everything, as such knowledge is often vague and frustrating, like a gift wrapped up in layers of paper and duct tape and boxes obscuring its shape. 

He’s dressed in a suit, wearing the same sunglasses she would never imagine him doing without, taking photos with a moderately expensive-looking camera. People nearly bump into him as he paces around the sidewalk, and by the time he’s stopped moving a few do. Their general reactions, however, are almost all the same: nothing. Most don’t bother to give him a second glance or say a word in anger or apology. They’re all preoccupied with other business, after all, minds tucked safely away in the dark red bands encircling their foreheads, in the red chokers around their necks that masquerade as fashionable necklaces but seem more like collars, or sometimes in the touchscreen watches with large faces that do more than just tell the time.

She approaches him. It’s hard to tell with his shades obscuring his eyes, but his attention seems directed at the large corporate building across the street next to a bank. It's painted in the same shade of red that’s coloring the majority of the bodies making use of the sidewalks.

“Strider.”

He turns, head snapping over his shoulder, but that’s as much of a reaction as she gets, besides the longer-then-normal pause that follows when he actually _looks_ at her.

Perhaps he’s thinking, _Holy shit you look like my mother when she was twenty-five._

(Except he’s never seen his mother. He has no photo of her for him to remember her by, except perhaps in the guesswork of his reflection. It’s not his fault, of course. She hasn’t been flung meteor-first to earth yet, and won’t for centuries to come.)

Perhaps he’s thinking, _Jesus Christ, Lalonde, what took you so long? I was beginning to think you were six feet gone like the rest of them._

(Except he hasn’t been around Rose long enough to miss her. Not yet. He’s never met her, he doesn’t know her—though in a way he _thinks_ he does, but that’s just a goddamn feeling, and most of those have led to nothing but dead ends where doors should have been so far.)

But Dave doesn’t have time to think anymore; Rose no longer even has time to speculate.

There’s a sudden yell, and a series of gunshots echo staccato through the air. A group of young people in dark clothing and obscured faces run out of the double doors of a building across the street, making a hard beeline in their direction, pushing and shoving anyone who happens to be in their way. There’s another man chasing them, someone who seems to actually know what he’s doing. He’s yelling something, and Rose catches the word _police._

Almost no one reacts. Some people stop momentarily, but most just keep walking as if nothing’s wrong. Only a couple people are disturbed enough to yell something, while a dozen or so more in the otherwise assembly-line crowd break out of the mold and start scattering. Perhaps more will follow if the stimulation jolts them out of their reverie, forcing them to ignore the messages in their brains ordering them to CEASE and IGNORE. 

If nothing else, they all will feel the migraines after. Some can take satisfaction in that.

The aggressors reach the curb, squeezing past a large truck parked in one of the metered stalls before dashing across the road. The policeman tails them close behind until a bullet hits him in the leg and makes him stumble, prematurely halting his pursuit.

The car that follows, however, stops it entirely. In a handful of seconds, a life is gone and the world seems only inclined to shrug as the dented car drives on.

Rose looks at Dave. His attention isn’t on her anymore. His mouth thins. 

(It’s because he knows just as she does that something about this world is more broken than it should be, and wants to fix it. He wants to hear _real_ noise again, not fade-out from a song nearing its end. He doesn’t want to be surrounded by almost palpable silence from those who walk away and do nothing, watching time pass them by through glass eyes. Dave knows this isn’t because people are choosing not to care, because that that would just make them assholes. He can live with assholes. He can live with cowards, too. He can live with people who possess an ounce of understandable self-preservation or fear and choose to run. He can deal with that. What he _can’t_ deal with is the fact that that choice—to care or not to care, to react or not to react, to think or not to think—is being slowly taken away.)

It’s a symptom of a dying species. 

But they’re not dead yet.

Not him, most of all.

Compared to them all, he’s goddamn immortal.

(And right now, he’s almost as dangerous as she is.)

“Fuck this,” he says, and almost before her eyes can register it, Dave is running after them. A sword appears in his hand, and he grasps the hilt with strained white knuckles. Rose pauses for a moment, considering, but in the end she’s only a few seconds behind.

It takes a few moments for the people in black to notice they’re once again being pursued, and Dave takes advantage those few seconds, making use of it as if he had all the time in the world, and closes in on them.

What he doesn’t have, however, is a gun. And when one of the men does react—to do something more than just run—it’s to use one.

It is then that it suddenly occurs to Rose, in the sharp, echoing wake of the sound of gunfire, that she’s forgotten to tell Dave something important, though what that was she can’t quite recall.

The bullet misses Dave.

It doesn’t miss Rose.

Her legs buckle. There’s now a hole in her chest and her jacket is being stained red. She must have cried out in surprise or pain, though she can’t recall doing either. But still, she must have, because Dave actually looks back.

And then Rose thinks: _I have seen this._

And she has, in the light. In the same brightness that’s fast fading from her eyes and making her feel numb and cold. It’s a peculiar feeling. She’s so caught up in it that she almost doesn’t hear the second rattling gunshot.

Unlike the first, this one does not miss its intended target, and Rose sees Dave die before his body has the chance to hit the ground.

This is what strikes her as suddenly wrong and disorienting. Dave hasn’t even told her his name yet.

How is he supposed to tell her his name when he’s dead?

But, now that she thinks of it, she has seen this moment too. Once. It was an echo of something that she can no longer hold on to.

Frankly, she can’t think of much of anything now. That ability has gone from her, though her brain registers something harsh and distracting that just might be pain. The people who have shot them down gotten away, and they are surrounded by people who lack the capacity to care about the two of them and the future that has just been cut short.

(But this is not how their story ends; it is only how it begins.)

This is how true fortune is realized. Following that one pinprick of light to thwart what was once inevitable.

Rose _has_ seen this before. And she just has again.

She will not allow those bullets to hit home.

She wants to meet her brother.

And so she sets out to make a fool out of predestination.


End file.
